Low
by MiroTheCat
Summary: "In case you needed to kill me? You can't. I've tried." Rated M for suicide attempt(s) and very very dark.
1. Chapter 1

**_Let me warn you again in case you didn't take the description seriously-this is dark. Really really dark._**

* * *

_"In case you needed to kill me? You can't. I've tried. I got low, put a bullet in my mouth. The Other Guy spit it out."_

* * *

Life is pain.

He doesn't want to do this anymore. He's tired of waking up naked who-knows-where, sometimes injured, with only a vague but for that all the more terrifying idea of what happened in the preceding hours.

This time he's at the foot of a steep rocky slope, something between a hill and a cliff, that he vaguely recognizes as being near the village where he currently lives. Lived. Doesn't live there anymore, he knows that much. If there even is a village anymore. This time he has some idea how he ended up there, why the world is foggy with pain. A hazy recollection of waking sometime earlier and farther up, disoriented, and slipping. It's a long rocky fall, but it seems the world is too cruel to properly put him out of his misery.

This time, he's not going to pick himself up. He's not going to slink away somewhere else, carve out a niche and delude himself into thinking that this time things won't go wrong. This time they won't go wrong, because there won't _be_ a this time. He's done.

He lies there, staring at the sky. It feels as though half the bones in his body are shattered, and blood still flows slowly from a myriad of cuts. He wishes it would flow faster. Then again, it's fitting that a monster should die like this, slowly and painfully and alone. He deserves no less. And yet he wishes he weren't so alone. He closes his eyes and tries to picture her face one last time. Only to jump out of his skin, broken body or no.

They never go away. The destruction, the rubble, the bodies. Branded on the insides of his eyelids. He doesn't know anymore which images he saw through his own eyes and which…not. It doesn't matter. They haunt him the same. He doesn't know the last time he truly slept. Every time he closes his eyes, he sees them. Fitting, he supposes, that the last thing he sees will be the destruction he wrought on the world.

But it isn't. Some of the men from the village find him and insist on binding his wounds. Then they leave him to his own devices in what remains of his house, because he is a doctor and he can take better care of himself than they can. He is glad when they leave. He wants nothing more than to go to sleep and never wake up. That won't happen though. As soon as their wives and mothers hear that the sweet young doctor was injured by the monster that flattened their village, they will descend on him. And all he wants is to die in peace.

He has a gun in his dresser. For self defense, he'd told himself, though he doesn't exactly have need of a weapon to defend himself. He can end this nightmare. He can ensure that the monster never hurts anyone else. He puts the barrel in his mouth. Will anyone even miss him? The villagers hardly know him, a stranger recently arrived and willing to tend their sick in exchange for food. _She_ doesn't know where he is, for both of their safety, will never know what became of him. It's best that way.

He pulls the trigger.

The other guy spits it out.


	2. Chapter 2

At first he thinks that he knocked himself out. He remembers jumping at a crash behind him and feeling his head connect painfully with the corner of a shelf. Now he's lying on the floor of the workshop and Tony is leaning over him holding gauze and a blissfully cold ice pack against his throbbing temple, first aid kit open on the ground. He pushes himself up, tentatively, taking over the holding of the ice pack with a weak half-smile of thanks to his teammate. He really ought to be more aware of his surroundings. It being him, a few days of headache is a very minor price to pay for allowing himself to be startled.

He catches sight of his surroundings and freezes halfway to upright. The workshop looks like a tornado hit it. Or a Hulk.

Tony lunges forward to grab at him, and he spooks like a wild animal, scrambling unsteadily to his feet and bolting. To his panicked mind, the gesture is one of attack rather than concern. This can't be happening. He can't have lost control and wrecked Tony's lab. He _told_ them he wasn't fit for civilization. Now they'll see him for the monster he really is, and turn on him. Like everybody does. He'll lose the people who he almost dared to think might be his friends.

Barricaded in his room, his mind reels. It's over, everything is over. He surely has only minutes, if that, before his former friends attack him and stuff him in a cage. He can't stand the thought. Can't stand himself. He's ruined everything. Again.

He glances at the window. That won't work. The Other Guy will break the fall. He already knows a gun doesn't work. His medical supplies, wide range of drugs included, are five floors below him. The superheroes will be on him long before he can reach them.

A droplet of blood falls from his bowed head, and he remembers that he has a pocket knife. That will have to suffice.

The blade has barely broken his skin when his door flies open so hard it rebounds off the wall and he is slammed to the ground, his knife sent flying across the room.

"Just what the fuck are you _thinking_." Natasha snarls, all but sitting on his chest. A few steps behind her, the rest of the Avengers are sprinting into his room.

"Come to cage me like the monster I am?" He's seeing stars and there's a note of hysteria in his voice.

"What? Of course not! Why the hell would you think we'd do that?" At the back of the pack Clint sounds offended, but there _is_ a tranquilizer dart in his hand.

"I'm a danger to everyone."

"No, you're a danger to _yourself_." Steve kneels and firmly presses a clean handkerchief to his bleeding wrist. "And we _will_ do whatever we deem necessary to keep you safe, including from yourself, because we _care_ about you."

"Yeah right."

Tony kneels on his other side, abandoned ice pack in hand. "You're not a monster, Bruce, and suicide is not the answer. You may have had it rough before, but you're one of us now and that's not going to change. Don't worry about my lab. It was kind of my fault for startling you when you were already stressed. Material things are replaceable, but you're not."

That does it. He starts crying, and then they're all crying and pulling him into a group hug and telling him never to scare them like that again. And maybe, just maybe, things might be okay this time. Because this time, he's not alone.

* * *

_I felt like the first vignette needed a follow up of some sort. I wanted him to hit another low spot and this time have his teammates show him that he's not alone anymore and people care and people would miss him._

_I didn't know how to make it happen, just that I wanted it to, and then I slammed my head on the corner of a shelf and realized that stressed + startled + pain = hulking out, and he's got so few friends and such bad past experiences that he'd probably really panic if he hulked out in the tower and damaged something important to one of his teammates._

_And how'd they know? JARVIS of course._


End file.
